One of Jimmy Carter’s enduring legacies resurfaced recently in Vice President Dick Cheney’s harangue on energy policy. Drawing on an image of conservationists as those who don sweaters and turn down the thermostat during the winter, the vice president intoned: “Conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

Cheney portrays a world of stark dichotomies. Real men, chastened by the market, drill for oil and dig mines so that all of us can live comfortable lives. Conservationists hunker down at home and denounce the risk takers upon whom they depend. Cheney’s rhetoric, just like Jimmy Carter’s infamous cardigan sweater, distorts the goals and accomplishments of conservationists. The risks they undertake today and the accomplishments they have already achieved are more likely to enhance the quality of everyday life than are Cheney’s pampered oligarchs.

One wag has suggested that Cheney’s energy policy reminds him of the householder who discovers a leaky bathtub and increases the water flow. Fortunately, homeowners are more cost conscious and imaginative than Cheney. Whether to turn up the faucet periodically or search for leaks will depend on the relative costs of each strategy

Both approaches can give us a warm bath, but energy policy today seldom encourages cost effective choices. Public policy – whether it be the half-century subsidies for nuclear research and development and oil depletion allowances or more recent “clean coal” research – has made it cheaper for most of us simply to open the faucet.

Nor are most businesses and homeowners charged for the real costs of our leaks. Unlike water dripping out of a tub, burning coal and oil is already imposing serious health costs. Coal-fired power plants produce 96 percent of the utility industry’s sulfur-dioxide pollution, a source of acid rain, 93 percent of the industry’s smog generating nitrogen-oxide pollution, and 99 percent of the industry’s toxic mercury.

Dan Becker of the Sierra Club properly reminds us not to be fooled “by the Orwellian newspeak of … ‘clean coal’ – it’s a coat of greenwash trying to hide one of the most polluting energy forms around. ‘Clean coal’ only strives to reduce some of these pollutants – they don’t disappear.”

Even with a playing field that is hardly neutral, conservationists have achieved remarkable results. An Army base in Louisiana reduced its electricity use during peak hours 43 percent by installing fluorescent lights, low-flow shower heads, attic insulation and new home heating and cooling systems.

The New York Times reports: “These savings were made possible by geothermal heat pumps, a home heating and cooling system that circulates fluids through underground coils but otherwise uses conventional technologies. The heat pumps, though still something of a novelty, … save so much money that President Bush installed a system at his new ranch home.”

Jim Hightower points out in a recent article for AlterNet that generation of electric power itself once followed a totally different mode. After inventing the bulb, Thomas Edison developed a system of “small, localized generators controlled by the users of electricity. Each factory and office building had its own generator, and neighborhoods had small power plants that the locals shared.”

Unfortunately, Wall Street financiers stood to make more profits from George Westinghouse’s huge, central generating plants delivering power via long-distance grids. Though these grids are omnipresent today, they waste energy in its transport. Hightower points out “The good news is that today inventors are resurrecting and updating Edison’s model with sophisticated new systems of ‘micropower’ that are ultra-efficient, clean, reliable, and inexpensive.”

Reaction to Cheney’s remarks was so hostile even from many mainstream sources that the administration now promises to include conservation in its energy program. Nonetheless, progressives should do the math before they cheer. Modest tax breaks for alternative vehicles hardly compensate for years of neglect of public transit and rich subsidies for the auto. Opening up more federally protected lands and limiting the liability for nuclear accidents will only build on long standing pattern of support for a costly and dangerous status quo.

Basic and applied research in conservation and alternative technology needs more than the crumbs at the table. A major push by government to upgrade its own house would reduce costs and stimulate demand for promising technologies. The Energy Department reports that the U.S. government itself, with about 500,000 buildings, could reduce its energy consumption by one-fifth and reap a return on investment of nearly twenty percent per year merely by investing in proven conservation techniques.

Amory Lovins has suggested an ambitious program to tax developers for building that don’t meet tough efficiency standards and use the revenues as rebates to those who exceed the standards. Unfortunately, substantial changes in government priorities are unlikely until we remind Washington just who is doing the real energy work and who is merely dining off public largess.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.